A deluge of stuff

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, February 21, 2008

America had an Age of Stuff. It was, I think, after 1880 and before 1955, but these dates are approximate. It was the time when America was rich enough and (generally) peaceful enough to make its own stuff, and to use it, and to cherish it. Now other nations make our stuff, and we ourselves are largely in the service sector.

"May I tell you our specials for the evening?"

"It's Room 214; there's an ice machine just down the hall."

"May I help you find anything?"

Metaphorically speaking, we all wear mouse heads and march in the Main Street Parade. Indeed, that's what I am doing right now. I wave my gloved hand, and later on I get paid.

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There is still stuff, of course, but most of it is made somewhere else, and not a lot of it is decorative, except as a "design element." History has moved on, and the stuff from previous generations, the tchotchkes and knickknacks and bric-a-brac and items of uncertain function, have no modern equivalents. When we want a fork, we get a fork - not a crab fork or a fondue fork or an olive fork or a relish fork; just a fork.

Do we put olives in an olive dish? Who has olive dishes?

Kids still have stuff, but the stuff is often related to a commercial-cultural entity of some sort, a movie or a television program or a video game. It's probably made in China or Malaysia by people who (I imagine) often think, "What the hell is this?" When the fad passes, the stuff becomes unthinkable. Who besides a small community of kitsch fanciers has Spice Girls stuff anymore? Menudo lunch boxes, anyone?

Older people have abandoned exercise equipment, but not even fetishists collect that. Somewhere lie a million dead Thighmasters.

Even when we had stufflike stuff, the stuff that became junk and then became classic or collectible or weird, there were tides of fashion. The tide would sweep in loaded with new tableware or commemorative coins or ceramic figurines or wall clocks, and then the tide would recede, leaving the littoral littered with unwanted stuff.

And where does it go, the unwanted American stuff from the Age of Stuff? A lot of it, as it turns out, goes to San Juan Bautista.

We went down last weekend to hike in the Pinnacles, and we decided to spend the night in SJB, which seemed like a quiet town (Hollister: not so quiet) with a fine mission. As a California schoolboy, I learned a lot more than I ever wanted to know about Father Junipero Serra and the El Camino Real and all those missions, which are artifacts of religious colonialism but are nevertheless sort of sweet, like Menudo lunch boxes.

So we wandered up and down the main drag, wondering how on earth a town that close to San Jose managed to stay so small, and we noticed an incredible proliferation of antique shops, or perhaps "antique" shops. I am guessing that antique shops cluster together for warmth because people who are into antiquing (sure, make your noun a verb; see if I care) like to go on outings and hit a whole bunch of places looking for treasure, or "treasure."

We were in Martinez recently, and there are antique stores there too. It's a symptom of economic distress, I guess.

All antique stores are cluttered; I think it's a moral thing. Just as no soup kitchen will turn away a customer, no antique store will turn down an item that someone, somewhere, might pay good money for. When I walked into one of them that Saturday afternoon in San Juan Bautista, I was assaulted by the wonder of the American Age of Stuff. I could not begin to count the number of items, and I was struck by the idea that, next door, there was another shop with an equal number of the stuff-empowered items.

There were a million stories in the room. Someone, somewhere, thought that it would be a good idea to make 4-inch-tall pink ceramic shepherdesses with little bonnets and frilly bloomers, and the nature of industry being what it is, at least several thousand of them were created and distributed somewhere in America, where sundry diverse people unknown to each other said, yes, I need one of those. The shepherdesses became ornamental fixtures in various homes, and most of them were broken or thrown away, but a few miraculously survived and somehow wound up in San Juan Bautista, where they will remain perhaps forever, beyond style, beyond context, beyond meaning of any sort.

The next day at the Pinnacles we saw condors, themselves miraculously saved from the dustbin of history, antique birds in an eerie landscape. It was a strange weekend.

I have a dog with a clock in its stomach; I have a large brooch with flashy red stones; I have an Old Gold box with shapely legs; I have a lorgnette.

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